There are 92 items tagged:Sandy Tolan

The Homelands Blog

Sandy Tolan made five trips to North Dakota this past fall and winter to document the standoff between opponents of the Dakota Access Pipeline and the pipeline’s supporters in government and business. As he reported on …

The Homelands Blog

Sandy Tolan has returned to North Dakota to report on the status of the Dakota Access Pipeline protests in the aftermath of the presidential order instructing the Army Corps of Engineers to expedite the approval of construction permits. …

The Homelands Blog

At a time when so much of the nation is divided by politics and ideology, the protest against the Dakota Access pipeline in North Dakota forged an unlikely coalition of veterans, Native Americans, and environmentalists who …

The Homelands Blog

Sandy Tolan‘s Children of the Stone has been named one of Booklist‘s Top 10 Art Books of 2015. The news was published in the magazine’s November 1, 2015, issue on the arts. Reviewer Donna Seaman wrote: “Tolan illuminates …

Sandy Tolan’s book about freedom and conflict, determination and vision, and the potential of music to help children everywhere see new possibilities for their lives.

It is an unlikely story. Ramzi Hussein Aburedwan, a child from a Palestinian refugee camp, confronts an occupying army, gets an education, masters an instrument, dreams of something much bigger than himself, and then, through his charisma and persistence, inspires scores of others to work with him to make that dream real. The dream: a school to transform the lives of thousands of children – as Ramzi’s life was transformed – through music.Musicians from all over the world come to help. A violist leaves the London Symphony Orchestra to work with Ramzi at his new school, Al Kamandjati. An aspiring British opera singer moves to the West Bank to teach voice lessons. Daniel Barenboim, the eminent Israeli conductor, invites Ramzi to join the West-Eastern Divan Orchestra, which he founded with the late Palestinian intellectual, Edward Said.

“Ramzi has transformed not only his life, his destiny, but that of many other people,” Barenboim says. “This is an extraordinary collection of children from all over Palestine that have all been inspired and opened to the beauty of life.”

This is a story about the power of music, but also about freedom and conflict, determination and vision. It’s a vivid portrait of life amid checkpoints and military occupation, a growing movement of nonviolent resistance, the prospects of musical collaboration across the Israeli-Palestinian divide, and the potential of music to help children everywhere see new possibilities for their lives.

“Eye-opening… Tolan’s exhaustive research and journalistic attention to detail shine through every page of this sweeping chronicle.” – Publishers Weekly

“[Tolan] portrays the multigenerational Israeli-Palestinian conflict by focusing on the life and musical abilities of one youngster, Ramzi Hussein Aburedwan, and his family and friends… This is an engrossing and powerful story, moving skillfully amid the failure of the never-ending battles and ‘peace’ talks between Israel and Palestine and the determination of one brave young man to change his world.” – starred review, Booklist

“A resolute, heart-rending story of real change and possibility in the Palestinian-Israeli impasse.” – Kirkus Reviews

“Anon-fiction account that reflects one individual’s belief in the power of music and culture to transform lives. His story is proof of the famous words of Margaret Mead – ‘Never doubt that a small group of thoughtful, committed citizens can change the world; indeed, it’s the only thing that ever has.’” – Yo-Yo Ma

“Somewhere amidst the separation barriers and the countless checkpoints, the refugee camps and the demolished homes, the fruitless negotiations and endless conflict, there is a people yearning for a life of dignity and normalcy. You won’t see them on TV or in many newspapers. But you will find them in The Children of Stone, Sandy Tolan’s moving account of the dispossessed children of Palestine, and the transformative power that music has had in giving them meaning and reason for hope.” – Reza Aslan, author of No God But God and #1 New York Times bestseller Zealot: The Life and Times of Jesus of Nazareth

“Children of the Stone is alive with compassion, hope, and great inspiration. It is not necessary to believe in music’s power to defeat evil in order to be enchanted by this wonderful story.” – Tom Segev, Israeli historian and author of One Palestine, Complete

“Sandy Tolan’s narrative artistry fuses the coming of age of a talented, ambitious, and fiercely dedicated musician with the story of Israel’s occupation of the Palestinian territories conquered in 1967. A major contribution to our understanding of who they are and essential to a political resolution of the conflict.” – Joel Benin, Donald J. McLachlan Professor of History, Stanford University

“Sandy Tolan has produced another gem on what is happening under the surface in Palestine. The book contains enthralling biographical trajectories of ordinary people fighting against the odds. Written in the style of investigative journalism, the book is riveting and uplifting, without skirting issues of contestation and controversy.” – Salim Tamari, Professor of Sociology, Bir Zeit University (West Bank), and author of Year of the Locust

The Homelands Blog

In 24 Hours: A Day in the Working Life, 12 Los Angeles-area workers – including a stripper, deli waitress, bus driver, metal scrapper, and bathroom attendant – take us inside their workplaces to show us …

The Homelands Blog

Why have the U.S. and Israel pursued policies in Palestine that have failed again and again? In an op-ed piece in TomDispatch, Homelands’ Sandy Tolan looks at the history, psychology, and cold political calculation behind yet another …

The Homelands Blog

Back in the early 1990s, Homelands’ four founder-members lived together in a rented house in Costa Rica while working on the Vanishing Homelands series. But after that we scattered, and for the last 22 years or so we’ve …

The Homelands Blog

We are thrilled to welcome journalist Ruxandra Guidi and photographer Roberto (Bear) Guerra to the Homelands family. As our newest producers and members of our board of directors, they bring a wonderful mix of skills, experiences, and …

The Homelands Blog

The Homelands blog may have been idle, but that doesn’t mean we have been! Clearly, though, it’s time for a quick catching up. In October, Jon Miller’s feature Greece’s diet crisis aired on Marketplace as part …

The Homelands Blog

As Egyptians prepare to vote in the second round of parliamentary elections this week, Sandy Tolan explores the roots of what some have called “the revolution of the hungry.” Listen for his story tonight on …

More than one million Egyptian farmers have quit the land in the last 20 years, reshaping the country’s physical and political landscape.

This Cairo family is part of a wave of Egyptians who have left their lands and moved to the cities. Many blame high food prices on the government’s policies that promote export agriculture. Photo by Charlotte Buchen.

One of the most potent sources of the Egyptian revolution was the fury of the poor who demanded economic security – including sufficient and affordable food. Fresh in the minds of the throngs in Tahrir Square was the food crisis of 2008, when sharp price hikes put many basic foods out of reach for the estimated 40 percent of Egyptians who live on less than $2 a day.

In the wake of the revolution, some experts in Egypt say the country is setting itself up for future food crises, and needs to protect itself by becoming more “food sovereign.” In recent years Egypt has accelerated its export-oriented agriculture, using its precious (and possibly soon-dwindling) Nile waters to grow high-value crops like strawberries and table grapes for the European market, while relying on the international market for staples like wheat.

These policies have brought in foreign exchange, but they have also forced more than a million poor peasant farmers off their land and into the cities. And, opponents argue, they have made the country as a whole more vulnerable to forces beyond its control.

Now, as Egypt prepares to elect new leaders, the country finds itself at a crossroads. Should it integrate more fully in the global economy, as the IMF recommends, or should it seek to become more self-reliant?

This piece aired on the eve of presidential elections in December 2011.

The Homelands Blog

Sandy Tolan and Charlotte Buchen’s report from Egypt for PBS NewsHour. It’s part of the “Food for 9 Billion” project, a collaboration between Homelands Productions, the Center for Investigative Reporting, PBS NewsHour and Marketplace.

Egyptians used to grow nearly all their own food. Today, the country relies on imports. The people on the street aren’t happy.

Anger over food prices helped contribute to the toppling of former Egyptian President Hosni Mubarak. Through the story of one migrant family, we explore how displaced farmers, angry about agricultural policies that favor “crony capitalists,” now struggle to put food on the table.

The Homelands Blog

Homelands senior producer Cecilia Vaisman, Magnum photographer Susan Meiselas and the production team at Magnum in Motion have created a powerful multimedia feature about the struggles of farm workers to meet their basic food needs …

The Homelands Blog

Loyal readers will be pleased to learn that the entire Homelands Productions oeuvre is now downloadable from our website. For the last couple of years you could listen to our radio features on a special …

The Homelands Blog

Back in the early 1990s, Homelands Productions reported on the contamination of portions of the Ecuadorean Amazon by the American oil giant Texaco. Today a judge in Ecuador ordered Chevron, which acquired Texaco in 2001, …

The Homelands Blog

Homelands producers Jonathan Miller, Sandy Tolan, Cecilia Vaisman and longtime collaborator Deborah George are teaming up with Magnum Photos on “Hungry in America,” a four-part multimedia series commissioned by AARP. The first piece, “A Little …

The Homelands Blog

Belated Happy Labor Day! Last weekend Re:sound, the Chicago Public Radio program that showcases radio documentaries from around the world, broadcast (actually “re:broadcast”) “The Work Show,” featuring Homelands’ WORKING project. The hour, which was first …

The Homelands Blog

If you didn’t hear “Ramzi’s Story” today on Weekend Edition Saturday, please check it out online. It’s a portrait of Ramzi Hussein Aburedwan, a Palestinian musician who took part in the intifada as a boy. …

The Homelands Blog

Documentary radioheads will definitely want to check out Reality Radio: Telling True Stories in Sound, just published by the University of North Carolina press. The book’s 20 essays are written by “some of the most …

Ismael “Babu” Hussein works as an assistant in one of Bangladesh’s shipbreaking yards, where armies of laborers dismantle old vessels the way ants devour a carcass. The work is perilous, the bosses abusive, the hours exhausting. Heavy stuff for a 13-year old kid.

Ismael “Babu” Hussein works as an assistant in one of Bangladesh’s shipbreaking yards, where armies of laborers dismantle old vessels the way ants devour a carcass. The work is perilous, the bosses abusive, the hours exhausting.

Babu’s reward? Just over two dollars a day, and nightmares about being crushed by giant sheets of steel.

The Homelands Blog

Ismael “Babu” Hussein works as an assistant in one of Bangladesh’s giant shipbreaking yards, where armies of laborers dismantle huge old vessels with little more than hammers and blowtorches. The work is perilous, the bosses …

The Homelands Blog

Happy New Year, everyone! I wanted to thank you all for listening to our radio programs and for visiting our burgeoning Internet empire (Homelands.org, this blog, the Worker Browser, the WORKING section of Marketplace.org, Worlds …

Leandro Carvalho had a comfortable job as an insurance agent on Rio de Janeiro’s Copacabana Beach when he decided to join Brazil’s anti-slavery task force. He says he won’t quit until the last slave is freed.

In the mid-1990s, journalists and human rights groups began to uncover a web of slave labor linked to some of Brazil’s biggest export industries: cattle, soy, sugar cane, and pig iron used in making steel for automobiles.

The Brazilian government responded, setting up rapid-response teams to find and liberate victims of forced labor. Since 2000, more than 30,000 slaves have been freed.

Leandro Carvalho had a comfortable job as an insurance agent on Rio de Janeiro’s Copacabana Beach when he decided to join the force. And he says he doesn’t want to quit until the last slave is freed.

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The Homelands Blog

One of the perpetual challenges for any journalist is to figure out when a person or fact or event is somehow representative of some larger reality, and when the personality or information or situation is …

The Homelands Blog

The Third Coast Festival has come and gone. What an amazing community we indie producers have managed to create! Two and a half days of hugs, grins, coffee, wine, and dancing. Oh, and networking, workshopping, …

The Homelands Blog

This week, as the global economy collapses, Sandy, Cecilia and I head merrily off to the Third Coast International Audio Festival in Evanston, Illinois. It’s an annual meet-up of people who tell stories with sound, …

The Homelands Blog

Homelands Productions has been around since 1989, creating public radio features and documentaries, writing articles and books, and generally doing our artfully journalistic (journalistically artful?) bit to promote world peace and understanding. In the last …

Mr. Wang has traveled through Beijing picking up perhaps a quarter of a million packages destined for dozens of countries. Does he ever wonder what’s inside? “No,” he says, “I just want to make some money!”

Every weekday, Mr. Wang says goodbye to his daughter and his beloved pigeons in an old-fashioned Beijing neighborhood, mounts his bicycle and ventures into the chaos of the city.

His destination is a local post office, where he parks his bike and climbs into a green express mail van.

Over the last 12 years, Mr. Wang (known as Laowang, or “Wang the Elder”) has picked up perhaps a quarter of a million packages destined for dozens of countries. Does he ever wonder what’s in those packages? Or who will receive them on the other end? Or why there’s such a big rush?

Diana Dimova says she’s never so moved as when she sings the ancient mountain music of her native Bulgaria. But it’s no way for an ambitious, attractive young woman to make a living.

Diana Dimova says she’s never so moved as when she sings the ancient mountain music of her native Bulgaria. The music, distinguished by its haunting harmonies, was briefly popular in western Europe, and still enjoys a small but loyal audience.

But it’s no way for an ambitious, attractive young woman to make a living. So Diana (better known by her stage name, Dayana) has decided to become a pop star.

She sings chalga, a popular form of dance music in central Europe. She performs for $10 a night at clubs, plus tips. It’s hardly glamorous, but stardom could be just around the corner.

Valdet Dule is a Kosovar and father of two young children whose job is to find and detonate explosives left over from the wars of the 1990s. Until the land is safe, he says, his people won’t be able to realize their dream of independence.

Long after the fighting ended in Kosovo in 1999, the people of the region are still struggling to free themselves from the legacy of war.

Thousands of landmines and unexploded bombs remain in farmers’ fields, in forests, along roadsides.

Valdet Dule is a Kosovar (and father of two young children) whose job is to find and detonate those explosives. Until the land is safe, he says, his people won’t be able to realize their dream of independence.

The tale of a simple act of faith between two young people – one Israeli, one Palestinian – that symbolizes the hope for peace in the Middle East. Winner of a Christopher Award, Booklist’s best adult non-fiction book of 2006, and finalist for the National Book Critics Circle Award.

In 1967, Bashir Khairi, a 25-year-old Palestinian, journeyed to Israel with the goal of seeing the beloved stone house with the lemon tree behind it that he and his family had fled 19 years earlier.

To his surprise, when he found the house he was greeted by Dalia Eshkenazi Landau, a 19-year-old Israeli college student, whose family had fled Europe following the Holocaust.

On the stoop of their shared home, Dalia and Bashir began a rare friendship, forged in the shadow of war and tested over the next half century in ways that neither could imagine on that summer day in 1967.

The Lemon Tree grew out of Sandy’s award-winning documentary for NPR’s Fresh Air. The book won a Christopher Award for “affirming the highest values of the human spirit” and was Booklist’s “Editor’s Choice” for best adult non-fiction book of 2006. It was also a finalist for the National Book Critics Circle Award.

Modern Turkey emerged in the 1920s as a secular, westernized nation where the rule was always to look forward, never back. But novelist Elif Shafak says buried memories have a way of rising to the surface. She takes us on a tour of an Istanbul street, where battles over identity, modernity, ethnicity, and minority rights have played out in miniature.

Turkey has long been known as a nation at a crossroads between East and West, Islam and Christianity. Literally straddling Europe and Asia, it is considered by many to be the exception in the Islamic world: a large country with a majority Muslim population and a westernized, secular political culture. It seemed a natural place to explore the heightening tension between tradition and change – a central theme of the times in which we live, and the central interest of the Worlds of Difference project.

As with all our stories, we wanted to capture that tension in a lyrical, sound-rich way that would privilege the voices of ordinary people. In the end we found a voice that is quiteextra-ordinary: that of Elif Shafak, a young, fiercely intelligent Turkish novelist and social scientist whose own work drills deep into the multiple layers of her nation’s history and psyche.

In late 2004, I called Elif, the author of five novels, including The Flea Palace and The Saint of Incipient Insanities. She splits her time between Istanbul and Tucson, where she was an assistant professor of Near Eastern Studies at the University of Arizona. In Turkey, she explained, the secularized, western orientation engineered by the country’s modern founder, Kemal Ataturk, taught Turks always to look forward, never back. This one-way gaze came at a cost, she said: the loss of a national memory, of both the beauties and the atrocities of the past. I thought this sounded fascinating. But how could we turn such an abstract idea into a radio documentary? She had an immediate answer: Let’s approach it through the voices on a single Istanbul street.

She had the perfect street in mind: Kazanci Yokushu, the “Street of the Cauldron Makers,” an unremarkable, litter-strewn lane tucked below Taksim Square and the Iskitlal pedestrian thoroughfare. Elif saw the street, where she once lived and wrote a novel, as a metaphor for Turkey’s modern history – a place where the nation’s battles over identity, modernity, ethnicity and minority rights have played out in miniature over the decades. A walking tour from top to bottom would reveal more about modern Turkey than any scholarly treatise.

I admit I was skeptical. How could a single street serve as a metaphor for a great nation’s history? But in the voices of the butcher, the barber, the grocers, the tailor and the domino players, I believe we were able to unearth a good many layers beneath the gray, gritty stones of the Street of the Cauldron Makers.

According to Proust, the smell of a biscuit dipped in tea can liberate memories long sequestered or suppressed. I feel fortunate to have traveled with Elif Shafak to her old street as she searched for a way to unlock some of her nation’s memories, and to dig for clues to its future.

Bulgaria’s Jews are survivors, but the language they have spoken for centuries is in trouble. Sandy Tolan visits with some of Bulgaria’s last Ladino speakers as they try to keep the tongue from going silent.

Put yourself in their place: You are told that unless you quit the country you’ll be killed. You must leave behind your home, your land, your belongings, your wealth. You bundle up your children and head for – where? You’ve heard that you will be safe in a faraway place, so you go, on carts or wagons or ships, taking with you little but your clothes, your stories, your songs, and your language.

So it has been for millions of refugees through the ages. And so it was for more than 150,000 Jews expelled from Spain by King Ferdinand and Queen Isabella in 1492 under the infamous Alhambra Decree. Most went to Portugal or North Africa, but tens of thousands traveled north and east to the Balkans, where the Sultan of the Ottoman Empire welcomed them. Over the years their 15th century Spanish changed—absorbing bits of the languages of Turkey, Serbia, Greece, Croatia and Bulgaria, along with touches of Hebrew and Arabic. Eventually it took on a name of its own: Ladino.

In 2003, I traveled to Sofia, the capital of Bulgaria, to research a chapter for a book called The Lemon Tree, about an Arab and a Jew and their common history in the city of Ramle, in present-day Israel. The Israeli woman left Bulgaria as an infant in 1948; in tracing her story I’d come to understand how it was that she came to be born – how most of Bulgaria’s 50,000 Jews escaped the Holocaust.During my interviews with elderly Bulgarian Jews I was surprised to find that I could communicate in Spanish – not perfectly, as many of the words and pronunciations were different, but we could understand each other. They described, in Ladino, the astonishing drama of March, 1943 – how they and their families avoided the trains bound for Treblinka.

One of those Jews, Sophie Danon, is the leader of the Club Ladino, which meets on Tuesday evenings to reminisce, to share poems and proverbs, and to teach the next generation – sprightly 60-somethings – what they know. Often they’re joined by a singer named Lika Eshkanazi, whose beautiful voice converts simple lullabies into haunting evocations of a long, deep history.

If that history has been hard on the Jews, it has also been hard on Ladino. Countless speakers were killed in the Holocaust. In Bulgaria, where most Jews survived that horror, communism and Zionism took the greatest toll. After the war, nine out of every ten Bulgarian Jews moved to the new state of Israel, where Hebrew would take hold. Most who remained were proud communists, ready to set aside Ladino in favor of the secular national language. So, beginning in the 1940s, Ladino began to move from the streets to the kitchen. While its decline has been slower in other countries, in Bulgaria Ladino is destined for the archives. For the few speakers who remain, the hope is that the language won’t die there – that the tongue may go silent, but that its heart will keep beating.

In 1948, hundreds of thousands of Palestinians were forced to flee their homes to make way for the new state of Israel. More than 50 years later, the villages of Palestine remain intact in the imaginations of refugees and their descendants.

I’ve been traveling to the Holy Land for about ten years now, and early on in my journeys I came across something deeper, quieter, and more melancholy than the noise and blood and rage of endlessly recurring headlines. I could see it in the faces of aging women in exile, transfixed before the television screen on Christmas Day, gazing at the Church of the Nativity, just at the end of Star Street, where they were born. I could hear it in the voices of grandfathers remembering a family lemon tree, or the silk and indigo of the Wednesday market, or the truckloads of zetuns bound for the olive press at harvest time.

This was longing: an attachment to land and village going back to 1948, when 750,000 Palestinians fled or were driven out of their homes in the new state of Israel.

In my trips to the West Bank, Israel, Jordan, Egypt, and Lebanon, I would come to understand that this sense of longing could not be disconnected from the current violence, or from the “peace process” that never leads to peace.

Indeed, the longing for 1948 seems the one main thing unexamined in the countless words of copy and miles of videotape spilled over the Arab-Israeli conflict.

For the elderly refugee living in a camp in southern Lebanon, who can gaze upon the lights of his native land, or for the middle-aged exile in Nebraska whose mother still holds the key to a stone house that no longer exists, the longing forges into political and human aspiration, embodied in a phrase that is never far from Palestinian lips: the right of return. Yet the longing also creates a physical and psychic disembodiment. For many refugees, the memories, even passed onto the third generation removed from the village, seem more vivid and real than the camps where their families have lived for more than 50 years.

“My home,” a young man in a camp near Beirut told me, “is the homeland I have never seen.”

Despite several UN resolutions, and after years of ambiguous language, the United States has now endorsed Israel’s long-standing position: that a Palestinian return to the 1948 homeland is no longer an option. And indeed, that homeland is, in some ways, imaginary. Yet the aspiration is real, and as deep and abiding as it has ever been.

– Sandy Tolan

Thanks to Jay Allison and our friends at Transom.org. Original music composed and performed by Mohsen Subhi Abdelhamid.

Mexican-American writer Luis Alberto Urrea returns to the slums of Tijuana, where he worked as a young man, to see a woman he knew as a girl. His story, for This American Life, explores the sometimes uneasy relationship between “first world” writers and their “third world” subjects.

In the late 1970s, Luis Alberto Urrea was working in the slums of Tijuana and Ana María “Negra” Calderón was a barefoot young girl, the unschooled daughter of garbage pickers. Nearly 25 years later, Luis is now a celebrated writer, winner of the American Book Award, and a tenured professor in Chicago.

Back in Tijuana, Negra is struggling to raise her children and those of her sister, who was killed by her husband. In this piece Luis travels back to Tijuana to see Negra after an absence of seven years. He explores his sometimes uneasy relationship and the obligations that “first world” writers have toward their “third world” subjects.

For the native peoples of the Amazon, petroleum development has often been an environmental and cultural nightmare. But in Camisea, a huge natural gas deposit in eastern Peru, the oil companies say they’re committed to getting it right. The Machiguenga people aren’t yet convinced.

Long ago, in the hot, moist folds of the Amazon, a people walked and walked to keep the sun from setting. According to Peruvian writer Mario Vargas Llosa, the Machiguenga believed if they ever stopped walking, the sun would fall from the sky. Then the missionaries came with new beliefs. Soon after, settlers arrived from the coast and the highlands. And now another wave, this time of businessmen who tell of a new kind of sun, below the ground, waiting to be transformed into light and money.

For a consortium of seven energy companies, including Hunt Oil of Texas, the vast natural gas deposit at Camisea represents potentially large profits through exports to the U.S., where demand is rising, and the conversion of vehicles and factories in Peru to natural gas. Officials in Peru say the Camisea field, one of the largest in the Americas, could mean energy independence for the nation. For the 10,000 Machiguenga navigating their way along the “River of the Moon,” the Camisea gas project means change, and the unknown.

Environmentalists and human rights organizations warn of irreparable damage to the Amazon and its people if the project moves forward as planned. They cite previous petroleum projects in Peru and Ecuador as reason to proceed with extreme caution, if at all, in Camisea. The energy companies respond that they have learned from the mistakes of the past, and that Camisea can be a model of how to do things right. It’s a debate that could affect the future of rainforest oil development around the world. And the Machiguenga are caught in the middle.

Hundreds of thousands of Sri Lankan women work abroad as housemaids, mainly in the Middle East. Their remittances are a cornerstone of their country’s economy, and a desperately needed source of income for their families. But their absence is keenly felt.

In a sitting room in a wealthy neighborhood of Amman, the Jordanian capital, three Sri Lankan maids – Mala, Manike, and Coomari – sit on plump couches, sipping sweet Arabic tea. Madame Shama is serving, for a change – and translating from the housemaids’ acquired Arabic. The women are here to explain why they’ve traveled thousands of miles to work for a hundred dollars a month. In a word: family.

“I love them so much and I was so desperate to make anything possible for them to live better and eat better and learn better,” says Coomari. “And I thought, it’s only two years. Maybe it will be worth it.”

By almost any measure, the housemaids’ salaries are tiny – some as little as 30 cents an hour, plus room and board, for 14-hour days of cooking and cleaning. Yet these women have been able to save for new homes in their villages. Their income now makes up the largest share of Sri Lanka’s foreign exchange. And as services that used to be taken for granted now keep their families alive, the women see themselves differently.

But there is so much that a desert kingdom cannot provide: carnations and bougainvilleas beneath a canopy of jackfruit trees; coconut oil burning from the shrine of the Buddha; the smell of curry and fresh fish. The sound of the ocean. And the touch of their children, who they will not see for years at a time.

“What hurts me a lot is that my daughter thinks my mother is her mother,” says Coomari. “When they tell her, ‘No, your mother is in Jordan,’ she says, ‘No, this is my mother.’ She doesn’t even know me.”

With so many mothers providing security from thousands of miles away, Sri Lankan society is undergoing a powerful shift – especially in the villages.“I’m trying to do what mother was doing,” says T. Ajit, the father of three boys, and husband of a housemaid working in the Middle East. As he spoke, from a small house in a village two hours from the Sri Lankan capital of Colombo, his sons looked on silently, bouncing a tennis ball on the cement floor.

The adjustments have challenged traditional gender roles about breadwinning and childrearing, and have given rise to countless – and often exaggerated – stories of abuse, both to the Sri Lankan women in Arab societies and among their children at home.

“All the social ills that assail the households, they put it down to the migration of the women,” says Myrtle Perera of the Marga Institute, a think-tank in Colombo. “The violence of youth, the alcoholism of men, promiscuity, teenage pregnancy – everything is put down to women going to the Middle East, migrating for employment.”

Yet there is no disputing that in relative terms, the migration has brought real wealth to the villages. “We found that the majority of the women who migrated and came back, over sixty percent of their households had benefited remarkably – education, housing, living standards,” says Perera.

At the same time, it is much easier to find people who reflect a deeply troubled sense that this global migration is tearing at the fabric of Sri Lankan society. One thing everyone agrees on: Good or bad, this mass migration of poor rural women – a product of an integrated global economy coupled with Middle Eastern oil wealth – is changing Sri Lankan society.

Debra Gwartney loved her two oldest daughters and they loved her in return. But then Debra divorced and moved the family, and relations with her daughters got worse and worse. Finally, at the ages of 13 and 14, they ran away. In this story for This American Life, mother and daughters try to retrace what went wrong.

The chronicle of a family that unraveled. Debra Gwartney loved her two oldest daughters like she loved herself. And they loved her in return. But Debra got a divorce, moved the family to Oregon, and relations with her daughters got worse and worse. Finally, at the ages of thirteen and fourteen, they ran away.

In this story, Debra and her daughters try and retrace what, exactly, went wrong.

Produced for NPR in the wake of the September 11 attacks, this documentary explores the historical roots of anger in the Arab world toward the west in general, and the U.S. in particular. Part 2 of a two-part series.

Produced for NPR in the wake of the September 11 attacks, this is the second of a two-part documentary exploring the historical roots of anger in the Arab world toward the west in general, and the U.S. in particular.

A visit to a shelter for transients in the Mexican border town of Nogales, where would-be migrants prepare for the harrowing trip across the border to the United States.

A visit to a shelter for transients in the Mexican border town of Nogales, where would-be migrants prepare for the harrowing trip across the border to the United States. Tens of thousands of Mexicans and Central Americans have passed through the shelter, undeterred by the frequent deaths of their compatriots in the Arizona desert.

The story of a boy and his hero, baseball slugger Hank Aaron, 25 years after Aaron’s traumatic chase for baseball’s all-time career home run record, and an exploration of the hatred Aaron endured in chasing a white man’s record.

The story of a boy and his hero, baseball slugger Hank Aaron, 25 years after Aaron’s dramatic chase for baseball’s all-time career home run record, and an exploration of the hatred Aaron endured in chasing a white man’s record.

This story is based on reporting for Sandy Tolan’s book, Me and Hank (Free Press, 2000).

Townsfolk debate the fate of an abandoned 19th century paint factory on Gloucester’s inner harbor. It’s symbolic of a larger debate over Gloucester’s economic and cultural identity.

Townsfolk debate the fate of an abandoned 19th century paint factory on Gloucester’s inner harbor. Developers want to transform it into a luxury condominium; some citizens worry that the town is turning its back on its industrial past. It’s symbolic of a larger debate over Gloucester’s economic and cultural identity.

A first-person profile of a West Bank boy who grew up throwing stones at Israeli soldiers. Now, as a teenager, he has embarked on a life in music. The inspiration for Sandy Tolan’s 2015 book “Children of the Stone.”

A first-person profile of Ramzi Hussein Aburedwan, who, as an eight-year-old boy in a West Bank refugee camp, threw stones at Israeli soldiers during the intifada. Ten years later, he picked up a bow and a viola and set out on a path toward a life of music.

An audio documentary, weaving the voices of an Israeli woman and a Palestinian man whose families occupied the same house, exploring the roots of the Arab-Israeli conflict.

An audio documentary, told in first-person by an Israeli woman and a Palestinian man whose families occupied the same house, exploring the roots of the Arab-Israeli conflict. This piece, which originally aired on NPR’s Fresh Air, grew into Sandy Tolan’s award-winning 2006 book The Lemon Tree: An Arab, A Jew, and the Heart of the Middle East.

Over the last four centuries, Gloucester has lost, on average, one fisherman every thirteen days. The memory of the dead, and the knowledge that there will be more, have always haunted the town and its people.

Over the last four centuries, Gloucester has lost, on average, one fisherman every thirteen days. The memory of the dead, and the knowledge that there will be more, have always haunted the town and its people.

For nine nights each summer, the Italian-Americans of Gloucester gather to pray to the patron saint of fishermen. It’s been a tradition since the 1920s. But with the depletion of the fish stocks, townsfolk are beginning to contemplate a very different future.

For nine nights each summer, the Italian-Americans of Gloucester gather to pray to the patron saint of fishermen. It’s been a tradition since the 1920s. But with the depletion of the fish stocks, townsfolk are beginning to contemplate a very different future.

Gloucester was once one of the greatest fishing ports on earth. Today it’s a gritty place where fishermen struggle to make a living. A debate over a proposed foreign-owned herring processing plant casts light on the challenges facing a town – and an industry – in transition.

Gloucester was once one of the greatest fishing ports on earth. Today it’s a gritty place where fishermen struggle to make a living. A debate over a proposed foreign-owned herring processing plant casts light on the challenges facing a town – and an industry – in transition.

Developing solar energy is part of the Israeli-Jordanian peace agreement, but the modest plans may be overwhelmed by market forces.

Legend has it in the third century BC, the Greek scientist Archimedes devised a spectacular weapon to save the ancient city of Syracuse – a giant concave mirror that bounced concentrated sunbeams onto the sails of invading roman ships. The sails caught fire, the ships sank, and Syracuse was saved. This may have been the only time the sun was harnessed to wage war.

But now, in the heart of the Middle East, the sun is a player in the peace treaty between Israel and Jordan. Some say the sun will soon be harnessed in the service of peace. Others wonder if the peace process itself will undermine the prospects for developing clean solar power at a time when developing renewable energy is becoming more and more critical.

In Israel, where developing alternative energy was always seen as a matter of survival, solar technology is pointing a way out of dependence on fossil fuels. Story produced in 1995.

Nearly everyone agrees that fossil fuels will run out someday – some say we’ll start feeling the pinch within 30 years.

Predictions of disastrous floods that global warming could bring to island nations like Japan, and to coastal areas of Europe and the United States, may force us to phase out petroleum-based fuels even faster.

If so, are clean, renewable alternatives really viable? And can they be developed in time?

In Israel, a Middle Eastern country with no oil or coal reserves, scientists have studied one option, solar energy, longer than anyone.

Different sorts of dreams collide in the Dominican Republic, where industrial parks, sugar cane fields, and a posh resort all belong to a single U.S. corporation.

To most Americans, a Caribbean holiday sounds like a dream. For many, the dreamiest of all is a stay at the Dominican Republic’s Casa de Campo, a place where people can, for up to $2,000 a night, luxuriate in the region’s poshest, most complete resort. Even the maids here are postcard perfect, dressed in kerchiefs, peasant skirts, and aprons designed by Oscar de la Renta.

But outside the oasis of pleasure lies the rest of the Dominican Republic, one of the poorest countries in the hemisphere, where, increasingly, the people who live and work there are seeing their own dreams dissolve.

Narration is by Edward James Olmos, who hosted a series of 13 half-hour Vanishing Homelands specials.

Part 2 of a two-part report from Honduras examines attempts by foreign and private relief agencies to regenerate the soil and help farmers stay on their lands.

For decades, inequitable land distribution, slash-and-burn farming, and uncontrolled erosion have turned entire regions in Latin America into desert, and forced hundreds of thousands of farmers into towns and cities.

This has created a new kind of migrant: the environmental refugee.

But two programs in southern Honduras are looking at ways to help restore the damaged soils, and keep farmers on their lands.

One is a grassroots effort that could serve as a model for small-scale development projects. The other is a U.S.-funded plan that is trying to change the way people farm across the entire country.

Narration is by Edward James Olmos, who hosted a series of 13 half-hour Vanishing Homelands specials.

Part One of a two-part feature about the effects of deforestation and desertification follows poor farmers in Honduras who are fleeing their damaged lands to an uncertain life in Tegucigalpa.

In many parts of Latin America, the ecological crisis of deforestation and soil erosion has become so severe that hundreds of thousands of farmers and their families have been forced to abandon their lands and flee to the cities.

In southern Honduras, a generation of poor land distribution and slash-and-burn farming has turned once-fertile lands into useless patches of rock.

Narration is by Edward James Olmos, who hosted a series of 13 half-hour Vanishing Homelands specials.

Backed by U.S. government funds, salt flats along the southern Honduran coast have been converted into giant shrimp farms where lax enforcement of environmental, social, and labor laws are the norm.

Throughout the Americas, the U.S. government and international lenders are implementing a vast new policy designed to turn the hemisphere into one big common market.

The plan first calls for a North American Free Trade Agreement. Then, all of North and South American would be linked under the so-called “Enterprise for the Americas.”

Under this strategy, member countries would privatize national industries, implement austerity programs, and convert their economies to produce exports for the United States.

In many nations, this new policy is already in place. In this story, we travel to Honduras, where U.S. and World Bank loans have helped build prosperous shrimp farms along the country’s southern coast. But some critics warn of serious environmental and social costs.

Narration is by Edward James Olmos, who hosted a series of 13 half-hour Vanishing Homelands specials.

During the 16th century, the hills of southern Ecuador were a center of gold production for the Spanish. Today the region booms anew, its mines worked by thousands of desperate peasants.

One November day in 1532, Spanish general Francisco Pizarro began the conquest of the Incan empire in South America. In the first attack, thousands of Indians were slaughtered, and their king, Atahualpa, was captured.

To spare his life, Atahualpa proposed a ransom: an entire room filled with gold.

Soon, fine gold vases and figurines began appearing, brought by his subjects throughout the Andes. To make room for more gold, the Spaniards smashed the objects into small pieces. When the room was full, they melted down the gold, shipped it to Spain, and killed Atahualpa.

Today, centuries after the quest for El Dorado, poor peasants, struggling to survive, have taken up the search for gold. They fill the pit mines of Brazil, the rivers of Peru, the hills of Bolivia.

In Ecuador, thousands of people have rediscovered old mines of the Spanish crown. Armed with picks, dynamite, and mercury, they revisit a legacy that began with the death of King Atahualpa.

Narration is by Edward James Olmos, who hosted a series of 13 half-hour Vanishing Homelands specials.

In Panama, the World Bank loaned the government nearly $70 million for its master plan for the jungle. First, a dam would be built, to help generate new industry, and wean Panama from its dependence on the U.S. and the canals.

Second, to promote land reform and new settlement, a road would be carved into new lands in the jungle.

The dam flooded the homelands of the 1,500 Guna (also known as Kuna) Indians, who were relocated to villages along the highway. Now, nearly 20 years later, tens of thousands of landless peasants have streamed down the new road, and have come face to face with the Gunas.

This is a story of two cultures colliding on the fragile soils of a new frontier.

Narration is by Edward James Olmos, who hosted a series of 13 half-hour Vanishing Homelands specials.

In the Amazon of Ecuador, two native villages have radically different attitudes toward oil development.

Government officials, industrialists, and Indian activists are staking out turf in a battle over the future of Ecuador’s Amazon.

In this story, Sandy Tolan and Nancy Postero visit two Quichua Indian towns with radically different attitudes toward oil development. At the center of the dispute is an ARCO oil rig in the heart of the jungle.

Narration is by Edward James Olmos, who hosted a series of 13 half-hour Vanishing Homelands specials.

Faced with crushing debt and pressure from lenders, Ecuador is rushing to open its section of the Amazon to oil development. But spills and dumping threaten settlers, indigenous people, and the land itself.

In the 1970s, large deposits of oil were discovered in Ecuador’s Amazon. The country’s leaders turned to Texaco to build an oil industry in the jungle and help pull the country out of poverty.

Now oil provides for more than half of the country’s national budget and foreign debt payments. But the ecological costs have been huge. And now many Ecuadoreans are beginning to question whether the benefits of the industry have been worth the price.

Narration is by Edward James Olmos, who hosted a series of 13 half-hour Vanishing Homelands specials.

The story of Bolivia’s nomadic Yuqui Indians and the American Evangelical Christians who coaxed them out of the jungle. The first story in the Vanishing Homelands series.

On Friday, October 12, 1492, Christopher Columbus wrote in his journal: “At dawn we saw naked people.”

It was the day Columbus and his men walked upon a new world for the first time. They planted flags with crosses on a small island in the Bahamas. He gave the natives red hats and glass beads. These Indians, he wrote, “ought to make good and skilled servants… They can easily be made into Christians.”

Today, just as in the time of Columbus, Christian missionaries bearing gifts and promises of salvation venture into the last of these hidden outposts to try to save the lost souls of the jungle.

Sandy Tolan and Nancy Postero bring us the story of the Yuqui Indians, 130 forest-dwelling nomads in Bolivia, and the Evangelical Christians who coaxed them out of the jungle.

Narration is by Edward James Olmos, who hosted a series of 13 half-hour Vanishing Homelands specials.

Preparations for the 500th anniversary of Columbus’ arrival in the Americas raise questions about the value of celebrating the event that led to the European conquest.

For the 500th anniversary of Columbus’ arrival in the Americas, the government of the Dominican Republic is throwing a gala party. They’ve spent millions of dollars to refurbish the capital city of Santo Domingo, which Columbus founded on his first journey in 1492.

The centerpiece is a huge lighthouse, which officials say will be a beacon of culture for the Americas. Heads of state from around the world will attend its inauguration.

But may Latin Americans object to the idea of celebrating the arrival of Europeans and the conquest that followed. Among those are more than 100,000 people who have been displaced for the construction of the Columbus lighthouse.

Narration is by Edward James Olmos, who hosted a series of 13 half-hour Vanishing Homelands specials.

A U.S. oil company has a controversial plan to build a new road and oil pipeline into some of the most remote Indian lands in the Amazon.

Deep in the Amazon jungle of Ecuador, across the Andes from the Pacific Coast, an American oil company has discovered billions of gallons of oil.

The oil lies beneath an Indian reserve and a national park in one of the richest areas of biological diversity in all of the Amazon. The government of Ecuador, poor and deeply in debt, says the oil must be developed.

Recently, government officials granted a concession to Conoco to build a road an pipeline to extract the vast new deposits.

Conoco promised to take extraordinary precautions to protect the environment, saying this would be a model for rainforest development. Opponents of the plan point to the legacy of 25 years of oil development in Ecuador: Scores of poisoned rivers and epidemic disease for the Indians living in the country’s Amazon.

Rainforest activists in the U.S. threatened a boycott of the Dupont Corporation, which owns Conoco, if the oil company went forward with the plan.

In this report, Sandy Tolan and Nancy Postero go on a journey through the oil and Indian country of Ecuador to see what oil development has meant, and what this new plan might hold, for the people who liver there. The story begins at the edge of the jungle, near the headwaters of the Amazon.

Narration is by Edward James Olmos, who hosted a series of 13 half-hour Vanishing Homelands specials.

Haitian sugar cane workers in the Dominican Republic live in squalid conditions. Although the sugar they produce is exported to the United States, the U.S. government has declined to intervene.

On his second voyage to the New World, Christopher Columbus brought sugar cane to the Caribbean island of Hispaniola. Sugar is now the biggest industry in the Dominican Republic, which shares the island with its impoverished neighbor, Haiti.

Early in the 20th century, and American company began importing Haitian field hands to work its Dominican sugar holdings. Every since, the backbreaking task of cutting cane in the Dominican Republic has belonged to migrant Haitians and their descendants.

The cane cutters live in hundreds of rural ghettos known as bateys. The living conditions of these permanent labor camps are considered to be among the worst in the hemisphere.

Recently, reports by human rights groups denouncing treatment of the cane cutters prompted the United States to review trade relations with the Dominican Republic. The U.S. concluded that workers’ conditions are improving and decided not to impose economic sanctions, thus preserving the Dominican Republic’s broad duty-free access to U.S. markets.

But, in much of the country, little has changed.

Narration is by Edward James Olmos, who hosted a series of 13 half-hour Vanishing Homelands specials.